You’re a feminist icon, Rafael.

You’re Olivia, and you fell in love with Elliot Stabler a long time ago. But he’s a good man, dedicated not just to his wife but his faith, his soul, and you would never do it to him or his wife so you both just feel the devotion burn in your soul until it nearly destroys you both. And he leaves, and you could have understood it, but not the way he did it. But it’s not just the love, or even the betrayal — those twelve years seared him into your bone marrow and there’s no way to undo that. Even after the healing, the moving on, there will always be that scar tissue and beneath it a part of you that has Elliot’s name stamped on it like you breathe. So you date men who are nice, who are safe, who would never leave you, because they all fall just a little short. But you can never take the plunge with any of them. And Barba is too good, too close to it would be really good, because there’s that part of you that’s still got Elliot written on it. And you could fall in love with Barba in a way you didn’t with anyone else, but the potential of Elliot Stabler is still there, always there.

Because Elliot was there first. Elliot knew Olivia first and they irrevocably changed each other’s lives — what happens when you meet your soulmate, and you’re already married, and it’s not your wife. What then?

Olivia couldn’t date Barba, because he might have been good. He might have been real in a way Brian and Tucker wouldn’t have been, and she couldn’t let someone get that close, let that happen, because Elliot.

So when Olivia says ‘this isn’t about him’ and Barba keeps bringing it back to Elliot, they’re both right. This isn’t about Elliot now — but it is about Elliot, about the fact that Benson And Stabler is a force bigger than the sum of its parts. It’s about the fact that Lindstrom was right on the money when he said Olivia had an idealized, possible relationship in her head, and she had to preserve that, all those years, because she loved him (and he loved her, that was the whole problem) and Barba was the only real threat to that.

Like... how she behaves when Stabler needs her is OOC and how Rafa behaves in this particular situation is also OOC, because in his mind she needed him (to protect her), that's why he took the case. And the only reason she "needed" him was because she had "lost herself" when Stabler needed her...

Am I making sense here? Haha

Law & Order: SVU | Ep: Twenty-Five Acts